Natural Hazards Research Summit 2024: Enhancing Nuclear Safety and Reliability: Identifying Human Failure Events for External Hazard Probabilistic Risk Assessment

This poster describes the identification of human failure events for external flood hazard mitigation actions at a nuclear power plant. Using task decompositions of these external actions alongside the Phoenix human reliability analysis (HRA) method and the Information-Decision-Action in Crew Context (IDAC) model, specific human failure events and crew failure modes were identified for each subtask in the actions. The methodology described in this project can be reused in conjunction with other task decompositions to identify weak points in operator response to flooding hazards at nuclear power plants or other complex engineering facilities. This project is unique in its application of the given HRA methods to an external flooding scenario, a traditionally under-studied area of HRA. The audience is other researchers in the HRA, probabilistic risk assessment (PRA), or natural hazards mitigation fields, and this work can be leveraged to develop targeted mitigation strategies for nuclear power plants to reduce the potential for human failure events during the mitigation of flooding hazards. Any readers are encouraged to seek more detailed information at the provided journal article link.